Back from Retreat

It was the final meditation retreat in a series of three that are required by my graduate program. In that sense, I feel like I've completed a VERY tough graduate program that kicked my ass from orientation week. Interestingly, the program got more intense for me as time progressed. I think this is due to how it trained me to tolerate how I feel while developing the ability to feed that back to the situation in a way that's not laced with my agenda or aggression. That is not an easy thing to do and requires feeling a lot of anxiety and tension. Consequently, I felt intensity more often because I didn't habitually move away from my feelings. Overall, the Contemplative Psychotherapy program is an excruciatingly difficult program that requires development in ways that I didn't even know existed before. I think it was tougher than Marine Corps boot camp—for sure.

This particular retreat concentrated on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. We studied the bardo and practiced the art of going through transitions with a strong back and open heart. It put the preceding 2 1/2 years into a meaningful context. That was good because often times I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing or learning.

The retreat started for me a few weeks before I left. I started talking at my internship about some people who died while I was in the military. They had haunted me since their deaths. I realized the first night of retreat that my actions of always trying to push these ghosts away and ignore them only turned them into demons. I felt pretty good at realizing this and was actually ready to go home because I thought I got what I needed to get out of retreat. However, that insight was only the stepping off point for the rest of the week.

That night I had a powerful dream of hunting down death with the intention of killing him. I found an orc-like creature sitting on a pedestal. I tried to draw my sword as it leaped down on me, and we wrestled around in the snow. It didn't kill me.

The next day, a dead entity appeared in front of me during meditation. I began tonglen by fully breathing this being into me and releasing it with the out-breath with love and peace. Only another being appeared after the first. Pretty soon, there was a line of death in front of me. I felt like I had no choice but to do tonglen for them all. I was totally exhausted at the end of the day and had to send them away. I had sat there with tears breathing and releasing death for hours of meditation.

The next day I took part in a Tibetan ceremony that is intended to release dead entities. The teachings say that when someone dies suddenly or violently that they may not know they're dead. So it's important to let them know that they need to continue on their path and not continue to try and reinhabit their corpse. My classmates were blown away by the number of dead people I put on the list. I sat there and shivered while doing more tonglen.

Then my meditation changed. I began doing an active visualization. I pictured myself holding a door open and waving as these ghosts walked out the door into a bright light. I wanted to hang onto some of them. But I held back and let them all walk out until there was nothing else going out the door.

An interesting thing happened when I stepped in front of the door to continue waving. My class had done an ending ritual the night before to go through the death of our community consciously. Part of that ritual was drawing an outline of our bodies and taping it to the wall. Then we all wrote nice "projections" on each other’s bodies. Well, my outline fell off the wall with a snap when I stepped in front of the door to continue waving. Then the gong echoed ending the meditation period.

I let go of a lot during this retreat. I traveled the bardo of death to its end. I feel like I'm at the beginning of the bardo of becoming. I don't know who I am right now in a concrete sense. This is a wonderful place to be.